


Spread the Word

by orphan_account



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, book black market, books are serious business, but I'm a romance writer so that won't last, dwarves invented everything let's be real, dwarves invented the printing press, printing press, relationships will be added later if necessary but for now none are planned
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-30
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-19 09:17:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2383028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dwarf from the Iron Hills arrive one day in Erebor with in her cart a strange machine that will change everything for the reborn kingdom</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It was a square, heavy, menacing thing that stood in a sturdy cart. It had been protected by a huge, thick sheet, treated so that it wouldn’t let water through, but the guards had asked to see what was under it. It was one thing to be welcoming in Erebor who wanted to settle there and start a business, but it didn’t mean just anyone could come in with a machine so heavy that the pony pulling the cart had trouble doing its job.

“What’s that?” one guard asked. He was one of the returned exiles from Ered Luin. His colleagues from the Iron Hills looked at him as if they couldn’t believe he’d really asked that question.

“It’s a printing press,” the dwarf on the cart answered, as if it were obvious. “It prints things,” she helpfully added.

“What’s printing?” the guard asked. There were a few sniggers behind him, but he silenced them with a glare. He was the highest officer present, and he didn’t like people acting clever around him. “I can’t let that go in,” he announced before the other dwarf could explain herself. “I don’t have the authorizations to make decisions about that sort of things. Dhrun, go fetch master Dwalin!”

The dwarf on the cart sighed, and grumbled something about how backward they were in the West, but then the guard glared at her, and she kept silent. It was nearly two hours until lord Dwalin could come, and by then, the dwarf on the cart was in a rather bad mood. Lord Dwalin didn’t seem to notice.

“What’s that?” he asked, looking at the printing press as if it might explode. The dwarf almost laughed. No press had exploded in _years_ , not since poor Loony Lain and his attempts to work with steam.

“It’s a printing press,” the dwarf said tiredly. Her name was Kharun. She was a good, honest, hard working dwarrodam who had hoped to be the first printer of Erebor and to make a fortune there. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. She wasn’t so sure anymore.

“What’s a printing press?” Lord Dwalin asked, in a tone of voice that made it clear that he’d had a rough day too, and wasn’t above unleashing his stress on someone who hadn’t really done anything to him.

Kharun took a deep breathe, and made herself smile. This was her big moment. She knew who lord Dwalin was. Everyone knew. King’s best friend. This was her _one_ chance.

“My lord, the printing press is only the greatest thing ever invented by dwarrows since cheese slice!” She cheerfully exclaimed. “It is a wonderful tool and, thanks to some process that I cannot reveal in public, it allows to make perfect copies of any book or written documents. With a printing press, you can have a hundred copies of any book of your choosing, without a single mistake, in barely a month, and with a quality that is on par with the work of the best of copyists. If you will allow me…”

Kharun went to dig into the cart, until she found the last copy of “Of Herbs that heals and kills and how to avoid them, a study in herbology and its many uses in all matters of life and medicine” that she had printed in the Iron Hills. It was a good book, that had allowed her to finally finish repaying her press, thus allowing her to leave with it for Erebor.

“Here, my lord, have a look at it,” she requested, pushing the book into Dwalin’s hands. “Look at the quality of the letters, and the illustrations. Isn’t it beautiful? it would make elves weep from joy, it really would.”

“It’s pretty good,” Dwalin admitted, and Kharun could see that he actually thought it was _very_ good, but wasn’t in a mood to say it.

“It’s fifteen shillings,” Kharun proudly announced. “Gonna start them at ten though, just for the first month or so.”

“Only fifteen shillings?” Lord Dwalin growled. “For a book? What’s the catch?”

“No catch, my lord. It’s the wonders of printing, my lord. I’m sure any of your guards who lived in the Iron Hills can tell you that it’s a very good price for a small book.”

She looked expectantly at the guards, and a few eagerly nodded. They had to stick together, Iron Hills exiles, or they’d end up at the mercy of those Blue Mountain barbarians who probably still made poor copyists do all the hard work. Well, Kharun was going to bring enlightenment, knowledge and progress to these unfortunates souls.

And if she could get rich at the same time, it would just be a happy side effect.

“Are you Iron Hill or Erebor?” Lord Dwalin asked her, eyeing the book in his hand as if it might explode.

“Erebor. Grandfather was a seamstress here, I’ll be using his old shop down East Coal Street as my printing house, soon as I’ve seen the officials.”

“You promise that this machine of yours won’t blow up first chance it gets?”

“My lord, I’m a _businesswoman_! I let the blowing up of things to _engineers_ , they enjoy it far more than I do. Blowing things up doesn’t bring bread on the table, you know. Unless you’re in the powder business, of course.”

Dwalin glared at the machine on the cart, then at the book he held, and finally at Kharun, who answered with her largest, most honest smile. The one who made her mother say that she could have sold a forest to an elf.

“You can get in,” Dwalin decided. “But I’ll come and check in, make sure there really isn’t anything exploding in there. Are we clear?”

“More than clear, my lord. And when you come, I’ll make you a discount on anything that catches your eye, to thank you for how helpful you’ve been!”

Dwalin just shrugged, but Kharun was sure she’d seen a smile somewhere under his beard. Not that it mattered whether he liked her or not now. She had gotten in, she thought, ordering her pony to move again.

She had her grandfather’s shop, she had her press, and she had her brain.

Erebor was hers.


	2. Chapter 2

Dwalin was reading a book. That was nothing unusual in itself. It was nothing new that the warrior had a great love for stories of all sorts. But there was something strange about that specific book, and Ori couldn’t take his eyes of it. It wasn’t terribly polite of him, he realized. Though he might have argued that reading on that night of the week when the entire company gathered to be together was possibly a little rude too (Nori, who had noticed the book too, had determined that Dwalin wanted to be asked, and so had said nothing whatsoever).

“What are you reading, mister Dwalin?” Ori eventually asked when his curiosity became too much. “It’s a queer little book you have here.”

“Just a History of Erebor,” the warrior grunted, looking a little embarrassed. “It’s very successful among the Iron Hills exiles.”

“What an odd book,” Gloin exclaimed, looking over hir cousin’s shoulder. “Never seen parchment like that. It’s thinner than silk, the nib must pierce it every other letter if you’re not careful.”

“They don’t use a nib on _paper_.”

Ori shouted in surprise, and ran to Dwalin’s side to touch the pages. It really _was_ paper. Actual, proper paper. Covered in the neat, small letters that almost made Ori jealous because the page was so nice and _clean_. He was a good scribe, and had earned a little money copying book sometimes, but he’d never done anything so regular.

“It must have cost a true fortune!” the boy exclaimed. “It’s really good work!”

“They’re sold for fifteen shillings,” Dwaling announced smugly, clearly delighted in the gasps of wonder and the surprised looks it got him.

Ori was among the most shocked. A book that size should have cost at the very least one pound, possible two. _Three_ if there were enough illustrations. Fifteen shillings wouldn’t even cover the price of the _meals_ of the copyist while they had worked on it.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, mister Dwalin!” the young dwarf accused. “I don’t know how desperate the seller was, but you should have known better than to take advantage like that… and you so rich now, you should have paid that book its full price, no matter what they asked for it!”

Dwalin’s smugness only increased. “I did, lad. I paid the entirety of the normal price. The lass who make these books, she sells them all for fifteen shillings. Tried to give me a discount, but I insisted I didn’t want one.”

“What sort of an idiot would sell books for a quarter of the normal price?” Fili asked. He sounded concerned, but Ori was _furious_ at the idea that anyone could consider this normal.

“Oh, no, she’s very clever,” Dwalin assured them. “She’s found a way to make books _cheap_. She makes them herself, and she makes a two shillings profit when she sells them fifteen. She’s got a machine… calls it a printing press.”

“Ah, yeah, of course,” Nori said. “Should have known.”

If that helped him understand, then he was the only one. The rest of the company was more confused than ever, especially Bilbo. When Bofur translated to him the prices being discussed into something he understood, he yelped just as loudly as Ori had.

“But that’s madness!” The hobbit exclaimed. “A book! For that price!”

“Nah, she could sell it even cheaper,” Nori sniggered. “Looks like she’s using fairly good paper. I’ve seen books for ten shillings… but you’ve got to accept that the paper will tear and wrinkle every other second, and there’ll be mistakes in them.”

They all stared at him. Dwalin had thought he would get to show off a little with his knowledge of this brand new way of making books, but clearly he’d just lost the upper hand. He would have been annoyed, but he was too interested in what Nori could have to tell them to really mind. Nori, of course, seemed to enjoy the attention. He always did.

“Books like that are fairly common in the Iron Hills,” he explained. “Ain’t been there often, and it’s the first one I see that’s this good, but they’re used to cheap books over there. Usually it’s nothing too great, like that History of Erebor shit, or books for students… anything that has a lot of text and is needed by a lot of people who don’t care about the form, but it’s still far better than…”

Nori interrupted himself, glancing at Thorin.

“Let’s just say that things are different there than they are here, or in the Blue Mountain,” he finished with a rare diplomacy. “It’s good that it’s happening in Erebor too. Going to make knowledge accessible and all that.”

“It’s going to put the copyists out of a job, is what it’s going to do!” Gloin grumbled. “If it’s so cheap… I think we should forbid it right away, before we end up with every single scribe and copyist in the mountain begging for money! Beside, with books that cheap, they could end up in the wrong hands.”

Nori sniggered. “What, you mean like, people who’d want to read them but couldn’t before because they couldn’t afford it?”

Gloin glared at him, which only made Nori laugh harder, a few others joining him. Even Ori chuckled, as if it weren’t _his_ job that was threatened. But to Gloin’s relief, Balin seemed to take things more seriously.

“How long do they need to make a book like that?” he asked, picking the offending object from his brother’s hands to inspect it.

“Kharun spoke of a month,” Dwalin replied. “She showed me… they need to carve the page in wood first, in reverse, that takes a while… but she’s fast, and she’s thinking of hiring people to help. So there’s going to be _new jobs_ ,” he insisted, looking pointedly at Gloin who shrugged, unconvinced. “Once she’s made enough money to hire safely.”

“And how long for a single page to be printed then?”

“I didn’t ask,” Dwalin admitted, frowning at his brother. “Who cares? No book is one page long.”

Balin inspected the book carefully. It wasn’t as beautiful as a handwritten book, there was nothing but plain text on it, but it would be cheap indeed, and people would soon all forget that there was more than text to a book, that they were a way to _worship_ words.

“I don’t like it,” the old dwarf eventually said, giving back the thing to his brother. “I don’t know if it’s possible to forbid these at this point, but I think they should at least be closely controlled. Imagine this falling into the wrong hands, as Gloin said.”

“Would have thought that you’d like it if people got a way of being more clever,” Nori retorted coldly.

Ori nodded fiercely behind him, along with Bifur, Bombur, both the princes and even Oin.

“It’s not about that,” Balin protested. “But have you not thought that if anyone can make book in great quantities, and for cheap, all sorts of lies might be shared as easily as the truth? Copyist are not just book makers, they are the guarantee that new books come from verified sources.”

Bifur grunted something about verified sources, their tendency to be wrong, their very narrow domains of interest, and where the people who thought they could decide which knowledge was good or bad could shove their books.

Balin pretended not to hear, but he did glare at Bifur.

“Thorin, you have to make a decision about this,” Balin pleaded.

“Even if you allow it, there’s got to be laws to make sure the workers are paid decently,” Gloin added. “When people start trying to sell cheap, it’s the workers who get the worst of it. Books for fifteen shillings! And how much will she pay her employees when she get them, I wonder?”

Thorin grimaced at the thought. He had been rather interested in this printing thing so far, but Gloin had a point. All dwarves deserved a decent salary, and decent working conditions.

“I’ll summon that book maker,” he decided. “And we will have a chat with her, maybe establish a minimum price for books, and a minimum salary for workers.”

“And a way to control what’s being printed,” Balin insisted.

The king waved his hand, refusing to promise anything about that just yet. Controlling what books could or could not be shared, even for people’s own good, would make him go from benevolent king to tyran in most dwarves’ minds.

Controlling who was allowed to print what sort of books, on the other hand… The end result could be the same, but it was all about how you said things.

The company did not linger long after that. They all had work waiting for them in the morning, heroes that they were, and Thorin had made it more than clear that he wanted them to be an example for Erebor. So he sent them all to bed, right after asking Dwalin for the name of the dwarf who had made his book.

Thorin noticed that Bifur and little Ori seemed a little too interested in hearing that name too, but he pretended not to notice it. Whatever these two had in mind, they could be trusted to be sensible.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Balin is not happy with the new job Thorin gave him

Balin looked at the pile of books he had to review, and sighed. He had known that this printing business would be a bother for everyone involved, and he was still angry at Thorin for making _him_ one of the people involved in it. Head of the Royal Printing Office, really. As if didn’t have anything better to do. Of course, Thorin had been very polite about it (he had made considerable progress in diplomacy lately, although only if it allowed him to mess with someone)(too much time spent with Nori) and he’d explained that since Balin was so _concerned_ about the books in circulation in Erebor, he should be the one in charge of them.

They had bought Kharun’s printing press from her for a high sum, and made printing a state business. Kharun herself had been offered a job in that business, but she had very politely refused. She hadn’t been very happy to see years of hard work be taken from her that way, as she’d made very clear. Everyone had thought that she’s go back to the Iron Hills after that, but in the end Bifur had hired her into his toy making business, and she’d stayed. She seemed fairly happy about it these days. Much happier than Balin anyway.

“Have you had a look at these?” he asked his assistant, who shrugged and shook his head.

He was a nice boy that little Doren, but nothing like Ori had been. Ori would never have given him anything to review without presenting a summary of it at the same time, unless if was confidential matters.

Balin quite missed Ori, but the boy had made it very clear that he opposed the way Balin and Thorin were handling printed books, so he’d quitted and he was now…

Well, Balin wasn’t quite sure what the boy even was doing these days. He spent an awful lot of time with Oin lately, as well as with Bilbo, and just about everyone except Balin and Gloin. He was apparently taking notes constantly, but even Dori had no idea what for (Nori knew, of course. But being _Nori_ , he wouldn’t say anything).

“How is the hiring process going?” Balin asked.

“Not so well,” Doren confessed. “We have had a few people trying, but the conditions you gave are very strict my lord, and so far we have only one person who could be eligible for a position… if ze does want it. Ze was not sure when I talked to hir, because ze was hoping for a job as a copyist somewhere.”

Balin grimaced. He knew he should have hoped that the dwarf got that job, because working with real books was far better than this mockery of literature they were dealing with in the Printing Office. All the same, it had been over two month, people keep bringing him books that they felt should have been printed and made available, and Balin needed _help_. Most of the books weren’t even brought to him by the people who had written them, nor even by relatives of theirs, which meant that the writers or their nearest surviving kin had to be tracked down to know if they agreed to their words being subjected to the barbarous process of printing… supposing the books were even worth it.

A few people had brought in what could only be described as _saucy_ stories, and that was just out of the question. Same for books on home-made medicine written by people who had never been trained as healers. In fact, Balin had also decided that it would be best to ban from printing books that had to do with cooking too, at least until he could find someone to check them and make sure none of the recipes were dangerous. The same went for chemistry. Until they could hire competent, _trustworthy_ consultants, the Royal Printing Office would only made books on history and fiction of Good Taste.

“Well, I suppose I’d better get reading then,” Balin sighed, glaring at the pile of books.

He had to go to Thorin’s council that afternoon, because they needed to discuss what was to be done with the state of some of the most damaged mines and streets. A far more important problem that this printing business, but there he was anyway.

“My Lord, I think you need to see something,” Doren mumbled, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. “It’s… my cousin found it and… you won’t like it, my lord.”

Balin eyebrows rose, and the boy blushed heavily as he handed him a very thin book. Too thin to be made of anything but paper, which meant it had been printed, but they had not printed anything so short at this point, and neither had Kharun. It might have been imported from the Iron Hills then, although the cover looked rather Broadbeam in making.

Intrigued, Balin opened the book at random, read a few lines, and…

“But that is pornography!” He exclaimed, dropping the book in disgust. “Where did you find that?”

“My cousin got it from the market sir,” Dorin explained sheepishly. “She bought that one, but she said there were other things too. There was one other story like this one, and some recipe, and the tale of the Mithril Dwarf. She got that one too, for her daughter.”

“How could anyone be so foolish as to buy a children’s tale that everyone know?”

Dorin shrugged. “There’s a pretty drawing in it, first page, and she said it’s easier to tell the story perfectly right like that. She’s had it a week, and her kid is starting to recognise some of the words, too.”

Balin glared at the boy, who sounded a little too enthusiastic at the idea. Doren just placidly looked back at him, utterly unimpressed. Another reason to miss young Ori: he too had stopped being impressed long ago, but at least he had the decency to _pretend_ otherwise when it was needed.

“Where exactly did your cousin find this… _monstrosity_?”

“On the market, my Lord. She didn’t tell me where exactly, but I think it’s on a shop that normally sells other things.”

“Your cousin might be protecting a criminal. If this book was made in Erebor…”

There were no marks on the book to identify where it had been printed, even though Kharun had explained that it was usually done. A way for people to know where they could go ask for a specific book, and probably for authorities to identify the origin of problematic material. Kharun had done it for her own books, and Balin had already designed what the official royal mark would be.

“I will warn my brother,” Balin eventually decided. “Tell him to make sure his guards keep an open eye on what is happening in the market. And you will tell your cousin that it is a crime to buy or own unauthorized printed books! She should get rid of that filth. Stories like this,” Balin grunted with a disgusted glare at the book, “should never be told, let alone written down. And children’s stories are meant to be told from memory, it has always been so.”

“Yes, my lord. I will tell her, my lord,” Doren promised flatly, and Balin was rather certain that if the advice was given at all, it would not be in a serious fashion.

Unlike Ori, young Doren didn’t have a pile of gold that let him be picky about the jobs he chose, and so he mostly kept his opinions to himself, but Balin had a feeling his new assistant wasn’t too fond of his way of running the Royal Printing Office. Young people. They thought everything new was inherently good, and forgot that the reason traditions had become traditional was because they had proved times and times again that they _worked_.

“Take that away,” Balin ordered, pointing at the book. “Contact that person you’ve said might be suitable, and tell hir that I would like to meet hir. Then go see if we are still ready to start selling the Offical History of Erebor next week.”

The first printed book officially published in Erebor, and it did move Balin somewhat. He had a lot of doubts about this printing business, but after all that their people had gone through, to make their history available more easily accessible… It would help the younger dwarves, the one who had been born in exile and had never known their homeland before their families moved back there… so much had been lost, but as long as they knew where they came from, they had not lost what really mattered. And for this at least, those awful printed books might be some good.

But then, Balin’s eye fell again on the piles of books on his desk, and he sighed. There was some good, yes, but was that good worth the bad, he wasn’t so sure.


End file.
